Volume cracker: a bimanual 3D interaction technique for analysis of raw volumetric data

  • Authors:

  • Bireswar Laha;Doug A. Bowman

  • Affiliations:

  • Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, USA;Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 1st symposium on Spatial user interaction
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Analysis of volume datasets often involves peering inside the volume to understand internal structures. Traditional approaches involve removing part of the volume through slicing, but this can result in the loss of context. Focus+context visualization techniques can distort part of the volume, or can assume prior definition of a region of interest or segmentation of layers of the volume. We propose a new bimanual 3D interaction technique, called Volume Cracker (VC), which allows the user to crack open a raw volume like a book to analyze the internal structures. VC preserves context by always displaying all the voxels, and by connecting the sub-volumes with curves joining the cracked faces. We discuss the design choices that we made, based on observations from prior user studies, input from domain scientists, and design studios. We also report the results of a user study comparing VC with a standard desktop interaction technique and a standard 3D bimanual interaction technique. The study used tasks from two categories of a generic volume analysis task taxonomy. We found VC had significant advantages over the other two techniques for search and pattern recognition tasks.